TRUMP WATCH

Even Some of Trump’s Haters Are Considering Voting for Him

How many people are seriously considering voting for Donald Trump? As in, “seriously” voting for him? As in, “consider him a serious candidate and give him their loyal and fervent support”? According to a new theory, there’s a contingent of people who hate Donald Trump with the core of their beings, but consider him such a giant middle finger to American politics that they’ll vote for him anyway.

If the theory—raised in a new Politico essay—is to believed, the troll voters are everywhere—especially in New Hampshire, where the first G.O.P. primaries will take place come February and Trump currently holds a 15.6 percent lead over his nearest opponent. Some Dartmouth students, for instance, are “nihilistically” considering him a viable candidate, and other voters in the state are voting for him because they hate everyone else. (“He would destroy the world, which is what’s so wonderful about him,” a Lebanon, New Hampshire, voter said of Trump.)

Outside of New Hampshire, where independent voters are allowed to vote in the Republican primaries, other people—many of them ardent Republicans—are considering hate-voting for Trump as a form of “creative destruction,” obliterating a broken G.O.P. and rebuilding it anew from the ashes of 2016.

It’s also unclear in polls how many of Trump’s supporters just want to watch the world burn, as this one intellectually brave college student seems to desire:

[Dartmouth student Ben] Packer said the most committed of these Trump supporters he knows is a student in California. “He’s really into this one French philosopher [Jean] Baudrillard,” said Packer, explaining that the student plans to vote for Trump to validate Baudrillard’s idea that image has become indistinguishable from reality. “This kid is so left he’s not voting for Bernie [Sanders] because of Palestine,” Packer added, referencing the Vermont senator’s record of pro-Israel stances.

Nothing says undergraduate politics like a shoehorned-in reference to Baudrillard. Now that’s some basic trolling.